Interviews

Jim Lee Talks DC Universe Online

Jim Lee is a renowned comic book artist who has made a name for himself with super hero imagery that's amazed countless fans and made a lot of money for companies like Marvel and DC. Lee currently serves as editorial director at DC's WildStorm imprint, which he founded, and divides his time between comic book duties and his current role as Executive Creative Director of DC Universe Online, the forthcoming super-hero MMO from Sony Online Entertainment. I had the chance to sit down with Lee at Comic-Con, where we talked about topics like costume design, copyright infringement, and drawing Batman thousands and thousands of times.

GameSpy: In past interviews we've talked about how you play MMOs in your spare time. How has that experience contributed to your role with DC Universe Online?

Jim Lee, Executive Creative Director, DC Universe Online: I think it's an understanding of when you sit down to play DCUO, whether it feels fun or not. If it has the appealing parts of MMOs. It has to have great gameplay, and then you have to have the community aspect. So if you sit down and play this game, you don't want it to play like a traditional fantasy MMO. At the same time, you want the experience to hit the same sort of brain cells.

You also have to play these games to understand what players don't want. Honestly, my own player instincts don't fall into the norm. I have fond memories of corpse runs and losing experience and that kind of stuff. There are no penalties for making bad decisions now, and there's a part of me that liked that in the past, but at the same time, it was a huge timesink. I think it's a lot better to have a game that's more casual; not "casual gamer"-oriented, but a game that allows players to get in and have a fun experience without sacrificing eight hours of their day.

I think that's ultimately why I stopped playing a lot of these MMOs. They just started taking up so much time. This game is awesome in that you can jump in, do a mission, and get that super-hero experience. You can still raid and do that larger group stuff, but it's going to have a wider range of missions than the first generation of MMOs.

GameSpy: You play MMOs with your kids, do you then go back to the DCUO team with feedback and feature ideas that they'd enjoy?

Jim Lee: Not really, when I play with them I'm actually playing. What I do note, when they're playing and I'm not playing with them, is how much they love PvPing, like in battle arenas. They'll even purposely stop leveling their characters just to stay in the level 29 bracket.

GameSpy: Wow, your kids have PvP twinks.

Jim Lee: Oh yeah, they love their twinked characters in the battlegrounds. That's pretty fun, so we're gonna make sure to have the PvP element, the raids, and you're going to get to explore the DC universe. The strongest memory I have from playing EverQuest was exploring. Fighting things too, but just going to new environments, new dungeons, new continents. I can't stress how much we talk about that on the team. Even making Gotham and Metropolis different cities, visually and in terms of gameplay experience, the different types of missions you can get. It's not just a cosmetic difference between the two.

GameSpy: You've probably designed countless super-hero costumes over your career. One fear that DC fans might have is that alongside these memorable DC Universe characters, you'll also have a bunch of goofy-looking characters because the average player won't have your artistic talents. What have you done to make sure that the characters people create will fit in with the DCU?

Jim Lee: The art director, Jared Carr and I had long discussions about this. We have certain body types to choose from instead of the sliders. I always felt that sliders didn't give you enough diversity. People tended to have the same sort of look. We wanted to have very distinct body types, silhouettes, so you can recognize them even at a distance.

Even with faces, I would rather give nine faces or six faces with very distinct and prototypical expressions than have everyone have the same expression on a face put together with sliders. I'd rather have one character that looks noble, another that looks doofy, one that looks heroic, and one that looks villainous rather than have some bland thing where you can choose the length of your nose and chin, the height of your cheeks. So we decided early on to guide the players on that front.